THICK AS A BRICK

After the release of Jethro Tull's fourth album Aqualung, which brought the band great acclaim & saw their folk-blues sound moving into more prog-adjacent territory, it was often incorrectly assumed that the album had been designed as a concept album, due to similar themes of religion across a few tracks on there. Eventually, frontman Ian Anderson got so fed up with hearing this description that for the band's next project he'd go all out in making the most over- the-top work

Forget individual tracks, the whole album is one big 40 minute-long medley Mike Oldfield style, like your Tubular Bells-type prog albums, & the flowery, flamboyant prose typical of prog lyrics (supposedly written by 8 year-old child poet Gerald Bostock, who doesn't actually exist) are used to describe not some high fantasy epic, but instead the everyday events in some small English town. There's long instrumental solos complete with time signature shifts & incessant Hammond organ noodling that'd make Keith Emerson blush!

Some of the instrumentation is actually pretty good in an unironic sense; Anderson's flute-playing is quite a highlight, especially in the funkier bass-heavy bits; & the drumming near the start of the album's B-side is quite good, if a little indulgent.

The people ridiculed Ian Anderson by calling Aqualung being a "concept album" so he struck back 4.5

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